The background description provided herein is for the purpose of generally presenting the context of the disclosure. Work of the presently named inventors, to the extent the work is described in this background section, as well as aspects of the description that may not otherwise qualify as prior art at the time of filing, are neither expressly nor impliedly admitted as prior art against the present disclosure.
Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) has developed standards for wireless local area networks (WLANs). Some of the standards, generally denoted as 802.1x, specify operating parameters including frequency bands, modulation and coding schemes, data rates, and packet formats for WLANs.
To provide high data rates, most WLANs operate in high-frequency bands. For example, WLANs compliant with 802.11a/b/g/n/ac/ad standards operate in 2.4 GHz, 5 GHz, or 60 GHz frequency bands and provide data rates ranging from 11 Mbps to more than 1 Gbps. The range of these WLANs is relatively short, however, due to high frequency of operation.
The range of WLANs can be extended by lowering operating frequencies. When the operating frequencies are lowered, however, the data rates also have to be lowered due to low bandwidth of operation. For example, WLANs compliant with 802.11ah and 802.11af standards operate in a sub-1 GHz frequency band and have longer range but lower data rates than WLANs compliant with 802.11a/b/g/n/ac/ad standards since they operate with bandwidth of 1 or 2 MHz.